“Nationalizing the Dead: The Contested Making of an American Commemorative Tradition from the Civil War to the Great War”

In recent years, scholars have emphasized the importance of collective memory in the making of national identity. Where does death fit into the collective memory of American identity, particularly during the age of empire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did death shape the collective memory of American national identity in the midst of a pluralism brought on by immigration, civil and labor rights, and a transforming culture? On the one hand, the commemorations of public figures such as Ulysses S. Grant, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt constructed an identity based on Anglo-Saxonism, American imperialism, and the “Strenuous Life.” This was reflected in the burial of American soldiers of the Civil War, the Spanish American and Philippine American wars and the First World War. On the other hand, the commemorations of soldiers and sailors from these wars also created opportunities to both critique and appropriate definitions of national identity. Through a series of case studies, my dissertation brings together cultural and political history to explore the (re)production and (trans)formation of American identity from the Civil War to the Great War. I am particularly interested in the way people used military funerals and monuments as tools to produce official and vernacular collective memory. I argue that both official and vernacular forms of commemoration can help historians understand the social and political tensions of creating national identity in a burgeoning industrial, imperialistic and multicultural society.

Advisor: Dr. Ian Christopher Fletcher

Publications and Work in Progress

“’From a Nation of Drunkards, We Have Become a Sober People’: The Wyandot Experience of Borderlands in the Ohio Valley during the Early Republic” Under Review at the Journal of the Early Republic

“The Imagined Crusade: An Examination of the Use of Mythology to Promote Nationalism and Christian Virtue in Britain During the First World War,” Journal of Church History 71 (December 2002): 774-98.

“The American Gospel: Methodist Missionaries in the Great War” (work in progress).

“Imagining the Dead: American depictions of the War Dead from the Age of the Daguerreotype to the Age of the Motion Picture” (work in progress).

“Darkness and Light: Culture, Race, and Empire in the Works of Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and John Dos Passos” (work in progress).

Presentations

“Darkness and Light: Mark Twain, Race, and Empire in the Philippines,” South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, November 2011.

“The Limits of American Empire,” Remembrances: Constructing Narratives of Wars of the 19th and 20th Centuries Conference, Young Harris College, Young Harris, Georgia, March 2011.

“The Science of Burial: Dead Bodies at the Frontier of American Empire,” University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, Tennessee, March 2011.

“Burial Sites of Memory: The Fallen Community, Commemoration, and American Empire in the U.S. South and Cuba after the Spanish American War,” Southern American Studies Association Conference, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, February 2011.

Panel Organizer, “Memory, Imperialism, and Sites of Tragedy,” Southeastern World History Association Conference, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia, October 2010.

“The Anxiety of Empire: Cuba Libre and the re-sinking of the U.S.S. Maine,” Southeastern World History Association Conference, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia, October 2010.

“The Politics of Commemoration: Expanding the American Frontier in Fascist Italy after the Great War,” Georgia Association of Historians, North Georgia College and State University, Dahlonega, Georgia, February 2009.

“’From a Nation of Drunkards, We Have Become a Sober People’: Early Nineteenth Century Evangelicalism, Wyandot Traditions, and Subaltern Resistance of Borders” Southeastern World History Association Conference, Armstrong Atlantic State University, Savannah, Georgia, October 2007.

“The Time Revolution and the Construction of Wyandot Nationalism in the Age of American Imperialism,” Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, 1750-1850, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, March 2006.

“The War for the Workers and the Battle of the Bones: The Intersection of Religion, Space, and Architecture in Victorian Britain,” Mid-Atlantic Conference on British Studies, CUNY, New York, New York, April 2002.

“Thor’s Immorality: Anglican Depictions of Germany in World War I,” European History Section of the Southern Historical Association, Louisville, Kentucky, November 2000.

“How Virginia Gave Britain the Byrd: A Review of British and American Religious Identity,” Midwest American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, November 2000.

“The American Gospel: Methodist Missionaries in Europe,” Indiana University Conference of Culture, Identity, and Power: National and Transnational Stories in a New Age, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, March 2000.

“Perfectionism, Social Reform, and Voluntarism: Christianity’s Failure to Protest Factionalism in the United States, 1812-1865,” Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 2000.

“The Flight of the Valkyries and the Moneychangers of King Arthur: An Examination of the Church of England’s Use of Mythology to Promote Nationalism during the First World War,” New England Historical Association Conference, Boston, Massachusetts, November 1999.

Professional Appointments

Postdoctoral Fellow, New York University – Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, “Memory and Memorialization: Representing Trauma and War,” Paris France, 2011-2012